Playing With Sharp Objects

This Christmas was filled with all sorts of delights. From good times with family and friends to new XBox 360s, bikes, TVs and laptops.

After dealing with the agonizingly inconsistent behavior of our Sony KP-51HW40 for over a year, we finally decided to replace it with a Samsung FP-T5084 plasma we ordered from Amazon. This flat panel display has an HD tuner built in, so as soon as we plugged it in, we were mesmerized by the few free HD channels that Patriot Media offers. Luckily one of them played the Pats-Giants game in beautiful colors and amazing detail. We switched back to the standard def channel every now and then and were appalled at what now seemed like a bland and blurry display. Our cable company offers a number of other HD channels for only a few dollars a month extra, so they may be worth pursuing. Our TiVo has been showing its age and now that I know our favorite shows such as Heroes and Battlestar Galactica may be running in HD on NBC, it may be time to look at the Series 3 TiVos for their HD recording capability. The old set has been relegated to the basement where it amazingly is no longer flashing colors or shutting itself off. We attribute that to the bumpy journey into the basement.

My son got another XBox 360, this one with the HDMI port which we can use with the new plasma system. The older one goes to the basement with the Sony rear projection system for simultaneous big-screen gaming. Of course, rewiring the whole entertainment center took about 4 hours of breathing dust and uncovering ancient artifacts such as an old composite cable labeled VCR. In all, we freed a number of unused cables from that jungle of wiring and took out our old faithful Pioneer DV-414 from 199, which hasn’t been used in some time since the XBox 360 was able to do progressive scan playback. A cheap HDMI cable and the XBox HD-DVD kit will let us get into some nice HD-DVD movies. I think that with the advent of the sub-$100 HD-DVD player, HD-DVD will come out the winner over Blu-Ray this season, the same way DVD won over Circuit City’s terrible short-lived DiVx disc rental system back in the holiday season of 1998. Only the final numbers will tell.

Our littlest one got a few video games and a new bike. My daughter finally got the extra Compaq C717NR I picked up on Black Friday. I haven’t seen any rebates from it yet, but I’m anxiously waiting for those to come in. She’s doing OK with Windows Vista and the home wireless is keeping up with both laptops. Nothing new on the music front this year, as everyone but the 4-year old has an iPod, although he keeps going to apple.com to look at the videos and hinting that his favorite color is green. In some of the pictures of our Christmas photos you’ll see a long string of cards. This is from a nice Mini snail mail mailing list on northamericanmotoring.com I signed up for where we traded addresses (50 total) and sent each other Christmas cards.

The break involved a lot of resting, and working to set up some computer projects I had on the back burner such as finishing the virtualization of the web server, a few network upgrades in the home, and setting up my dad’s Dell PowerEdge 2950 (2x 3GHz dual core, 16GB mem) with CentOS and VMWare Server. There was a lot of Halo 3 being played! We closed the holidays with a New Years Eve bash at the Stress Factory comedy club in New Brunswich NJ where Joey Kola and Patty Rosborough performed to a sold out crowd.

So I got a new Dell Vostro 200 last week that I wanted to set up to start working a little more in depth with VMWare at home. We already use VMWare ESX extensively at work but I have a lot of old machines running as servers in my house and I would be remiss in not applying the server consolidation idea to my own setup. So Sunday night I decommissioned an old desktop that I was running a couple of test VMs for Solaris 10 x86 and SUSE. It was brain dead easy to just install 64-bit CentOS 5, add the free VMWare Server 1.0.4, shutdown the VMs on the old server and copy them to the new one, and start them up again on the new system. Little did I know that the system I WAS using as this web server had developed some suicidal relation with this other machine and decided to implode in the wee hours of the morning. This is the second time in the five years I’ve owned the Abit NF7-S model of motherboard that it has done this exact thing to me. The last time was almost 2 years to today, when the board died with a week left in the three year warranty. At least I still have the original hard drive.

Needless to say, I was very desperate to get this up and running and I did not have a spare motherboard to run this on, nor enough space on the VMWare server’s 80GB drive for the web server’s 160GB mostly unused drive. VMWare Server has this neat little feature that lets you run a VM off a physical drive, so
I popped the physical SATA drive in this morning. However, I was stuck most of this evening trying to get what was once a SATA drive booting off /dev/hde to boot inside of the VM’s scsi architecture as /dev/sda.
It turned out I did not have any scsi drivers inside of the initrd, so I had to make sure all the right drivers were being handled.

For those that might go through this in the future, you need to use the appropriate Linux CD to do a rescue (”linux rescue”), chroot to the mounted filesystem /mnt/sysimage, change any instances of the old partition info (root=LABEL=/) to the new drive (root=/dev/sda1 in my case) in grub.conf, and do a mystical incantation similar to the following…

* cp /boot/initrd-2.4.20-8.img /boot/initrd-2.4.20-8-bak.img (just in case)
* mkinitrd –preload=scsi_mod –preload=sd_mod –preload=BusLogic /boot/initrd-2.4.20-8.img 2.4.20-8
* grub-install -f -v –recheck /dev/sda

and be sure to make /etc/modules.conf or /etc/modprobe.conf have this to handle the network and scsi adapters…

* alias eth0 pcnet32
* alias scsi_hostadapter BusLogic

Lo and behold it booted up straight away, prompting Anaconda to remove all the old nVidia hardware from the old motherboard and add the new VMWare virtual hardware. And now you can read this on the restored system!

On order is an extra 2GB of memory, and a new 500GB drive that I will be using to host a vmdk copy of this physical drive. This should give me plenty of capacity for running services and test systems. I eventually plan on migrating this web server and all of its services over to a CentOS 5 system to keep things up to date automatically rather than manually compiling all the packages for RH9 as I do these days.

We’ve been peppered with the Believe campaign and a slew of beverages in the cafeteria case at work, clix figures, and all sorts of other Halo 3 merch (see exhibits a and b). Most notable is the fact that I finally finished Halo 2 for the first time a week ago. This is because, other than those brief strays into finishing Crackdown and most of the way through Saint’s Row, Halo 2 multiplayer totally sucked me in and occupied pretty much all of my Xbox time in those years. When the Beta of Halo 3 came out, we were soooo there. The look of the multiplayer was beautiful and we loved it, but alas it was only here for a few weeks. After milking our money’s worth out of Halo 2 for three years, the final game is here!

I’m only up to Outskirts so far but I’ll definitely give the rest of the game a chance. Our 4 year old made it on as far on easy using his favorite weapon: melee attack. Go figure. My impression of the game so far is that while the look of the game is super fantastic and better than anything that has ever been created for gaming platforms, the brutes have been nerfed, load times take much longer after you’ve died, it’s pretty repetitive and Cortana is REALLY ANNOYING!! So I imagine that I’ll dive right back into the familiar multiplayer with all the cool new maps and I might finish this game up over the next few years, just in time for “Halo 4: The Floodening”.

Looks like major changes are on the way for our favorite game. Two and a half years later, it is definitely still going strong in our household. Hard to believe, in the days where a game publisher will usually abandon a title after almost a year.

First, there are the two new maps coming out in about a week, updating some old favorites from the original Halo. I can still remember playing all those maps over the Game Spy Tunnel for playing system link games over the Internet before XBox Live ever came out. Ah, the memories of how terrible I was and how I was often corpse humped. I can’t wait to see these because each new map adds another level of interest to the game - which weapons work best in certain sections, and discovering where the new camping and spawn points are.

Bungie has been mucking with the play lists as of late. The last reorganization took out Team Swat, which was my absolute favorite. The other ranked playlists seem to be too full of modders to enjoy anymore, so I spend most of my time in Rumble Training where you get a good variety of playlists and players. I’d like to see some of the playlists like Rumble Armory come back, which are along the same lines as Swat. Even the cult favorite Zombies should be placed in there, since there are so few that get the idea of the game the first time its played and it would be nice to have the team switch enforced when someone is killed by the zombie.

Next, there is the looming threat from Bungie of rank resets when the new maps are released. My opinion on this is that lower ranked people will have a terrible time playing games because people who are legitimately higher in levels will appear as much lower levels - something the derankers always love to do. While I have done my share of getting a 2-month XBox Live pass for the sake of appearing as a lower rank in games, I can attest that it sucks when it is done to you. Not quite as pathetic as modders, but it still stinks. I’m guessing that with Halo 3 around the corner, this is the last map update and rank reset we will see in a long time. Or it will be defined as an automated yearly or semi-yearly event.

It is likely that Bungie will take this opportunity to address some of the modding that is still plaguing the game. I can’t understand why Bungie or Microsoft can’t use a checksum system to determine if a map has been altered when joining a game. Things like super jumping could possibly disappear, although Bungie has said that this has not been touched because everyone can do it. This argument doesn’t fly because there were plenty of ragdoll and dummy cheats that everyone was able to do with vehicles when the game first hit XBox Live. Plenty of things like pulling the flag or bomb through the floor to get it to the target quicker. There is even still the glitch on Warlock in Crazy King where the hill is under a platform and you can gain time on the hill while standing on the platform rather than under it. I admit to having done that a lot.

The upcoming Halo 3 beta was a real sales booster for Crackdown. At first I thought this tie-in was a cheap gimmick for boosting sales. I saw a future where the beta for Burnout 6 was packaged in with Crash Bandicoot 5 or a beta for World of Warcraft was bought for placement in Kabuki Warriors 2. The deluge of screenshots and trailers from Halo 3 made this a sure seller. And then we played it and loved it - it has turned out to be one of the few XBox titles that I made time for in order to actually finish it. As a fanatic of Halo, I have to shamefully admit that I never made it more than a third of the way through Halo and only three-quarters of the way through Halo 2 before I was completely hooked on the multiplayer gaming. It helps that Crackdown has a very short storyline compared with something like Gears of War. But the ability to play completely off the rails of the storyline and pursue the extra achievements makes this game a winner. I even took some of the official game sounds for my ringtones. And I suspect that the achievements being built into Halo 3 will lead me to actually finish the game this time.

All this with the reports of the changes coming in the Spring update continue to make the XBox 360 the most exciting system and Halo the top game franchise. Add-ons like the keyboard attachment (more pics here) are just over the horizon. See you in the Rumble Pit!

I’ve been running Firefly Mediaserver 2.4 (formerly mt-daapd) and Twonky Musicserver 2.8 for some time now in my home to stream music from my single audio repository to iTunes and my Netgear MP101 players. This past week we picked up an XBox 360 and wanted to take advantage of its ability to stream music while playing games. Because of our simple setup, pumping all of our audio components through a single receiver, this hasn’t been possible in the past. Now we can.

While Twonky Musicserver was free for some time, Twonky decided after the 2.9.1 version that they would no longer offer a free version. Certain that I could find a free alternative, I decided to save the US$30 Twonky was charging and try my hand at the older free version. Having unsuccessfully scoured the net for the 2.9.1 version, which some say was able to work with the XBox 360’s UPNP capability, I gave up on it. Firefly Mediaserver does not do UPNP, so that was out, although I still need it for streaming mp3s to iTunes over an ssh pipe. I still wasn’t ready to part with my hard earned cash.

Googling for UPNP XBox 360, I came across two other servers that looked promising. gMediaServer threw a bunch of errors and would not compile, no matter what I tried. Geexbox uShare compiled from source, but would not show up on the XBox 360 screens when searching for computers with music.

Working from a tip at http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=473403 I finally found 360MediaServer, a Java based service that worked right off the bat. All you need to do is run it (./start) and connect to its configuration page at http://127.0.0.1:7000/configure and fill in the few required fields to customize it. Giving it a FriendlyName of “Oporto:1” (the :1 is required for it to appear as a Windows Media Connect source) and pointing it to the directory full of mp3s, I was immediately able to browse through all the music from my XBox 360. My only complaint is that I cannot pick songs by Genre from the 360, but at least I have the music going where I want it. It’s only at version 0.0.1 right now after having been released only 20 days ago, so given time this should flesh out nicely. Thanks tawsi!